Intelligent Design

O’Leary for News’s new series here at Evolution News & Views: A while back, I started a series here called “Science Fictions” that I began by asking a simple question: Why is the space alien understood as science but Bigfoot as mythology? The reason I asked is that, still lacking specimens of either entity, decade after decade, answers are likely to be revealing. Those answers help us see how “science” is understood, allowing us to interpret claims about the origin of the universe, life, human life, and the human mind. In general, naturalism (the idea that inanimate nature somehow created minds) seems to be the guiding principle of enterprises classed as science today, even though the evidence actually goes in Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone Elizabeth Liddle has weighed in on the “coins on the table” issue I raised in this post. Readers will remember the simple question I asked: If you came across a table on which was set 500 coins (no tossing involved) and all 500 coins displayed the “heads” side of the coin, how on earth would you test “chance” as a hypothesis to explain this particular configuration of coins on a table? Dr. Liddle’s answer: Chance is not an explanation, and therefore cannot be rejected, or supported, as a hypothesis. Staggering. Gobsmacking. Astounding. Superlatives fail me. Not only is Dr. Liddle’s statement false, it is the exact opposite of the truth. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies, to name Read More ›

Earlier this year two different mammalian fossils, discovered in China, have revealed yet more problems for evolution. The problem is that, as with the existing evidence, the new findings point to “radically different,” as one evolutionistadmitted, models of the origin of mammals. One of the new fossil findings, as with most of the molecular data, points to a much earlier origin of mammals, going back more than 200 million years ago. The other new finding is closer to the traditional, fossil-based, dating, closer to 150 million years ago.  Read more

When facing maximum uncertainty, it seems paradoxical that one can have great assurance about certain things. This has enormous relevance to ID because Darwinists will argue, “how can you be so certain of something when it is apparent there is great uncertainty in the system.” I will respond by saying, “when we have maximum uncertainty about what specific configuration 500 fair coins is in (by randomizing the coins in some vigorous fashion), we simultaneously have almost near certainty about which configurations it cannot be in — such as all-coins heads or a pre-specified sequence….” When a process like a biotic soup maximizes uncertainty about possible polymer sequences that can evolve, it gives us near certainty life will not evolve by Read More ›

Today, Phys.Org reports on the following research item concerning bird feather evolution: Research by Cambridge PhD candidate Thanh-Lan Gluckman, published today in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, looks afresh at similarities and differences in plumage in almost 300 members of the Anseriformes and Galiformes orders . . . /blockquote> It seems that the idea that sexual selection determines this kind of plumage dates well before the time of Darwin (Charles, that is, since his grandfather, Erasmus, was very big on evolution, and very big on sexual selection as a conduit of said evolution.) The Phys.Org articles tells us: As early as 1780, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London published a paper by John Hunter proposing Read More ›

I know nothing about Karl Pierson, the Arapahoe High School shooter, other than the brief sketches I have seen in the paper the last few days.  I have neither read nor heard about his writings (other than the Latin tag he wrote on his arm).  In fact, I do not know if any such writings exist, but I suspect they do.  It seems that people like Pierson always want other people, at least the ones they don’t kill, to have the benefit of their erudition. That said, I am going to go out on a limb and make a prediction.  I predict that if he did leave behind writings, those writings will indicate that he was a committed Darwinist.  I Read More ›

Or does the observed biochemical complexity imply design? Dr. Granville Sewell finds: Intelligent design theories gaining steam in scientific circles “The debut at #7 on the New York Times best seller list last July of Stephen Meyer’s new book Darwin’s Doubt is evidence that the scientific theory of intelligent design (ID) continues to gain momentum. . . .

Scientists continue to improve their amazing ability to recover microscopic DNA molecules from ancient fossils and this new source of old data is causing problems for evolution. The latest finding, published earlier this month, comes from hominin fossils found in caves in northern Spain. In recent decades fossils from a few dozen individuals have been found in these caves. According to evolution these fossils should have been ancestors of the Neanderthals but the recovered DNA have falsified this expectation. Instead the DNA is more closely related to the Denisovans, so named after the Siberian cave where their bones were discovered. This is not a minor problem and, once again, evolutionists struggle to reconcile their theory with the evidence as these quotesreveal: Read More ›

The problem with science is not that the naturalistic approach might occasionally be inadequate. The problem is that science would never know any better. Science’s blind spot is that it has no way of determining whether a phenomenon is naturalistic. You might think that scientific failures would provide a pretty good hint. If love defies logic then maybe there is something more to it. But for evolutionists failure merely indicates the problem is not yet solved. See the catch? Anything that defies explanation is automatically placed in the “Research Problem” category. So naturalism can never be false. It is untestable. Here is an example of this metaphysical mandate:  Read more

If you came across a table on which was set 500 coins (no tossing involved) and all 500 coins displayed the “heads” side of the coin, would you reject “chance” as a hypothesis to explain this particular configuration of coins on a table?